You learn songs from a laymans perspective, from a basic chords perspective so to speak, and scales fit right into the music sweetly.

If you tackle the songs from listening to their early years, especially while watching how it's done on U Tube, you see that it isn't really all that hard. You just have to keep at it, and apply yourself, and believe that you can get there.

How many times have you played a passage where just afterwards, you know in your heart of hearts, that Jerry or Bobby, at one point in their collaboration, played exactly the same phrase, with the same feel.

And when you do that, you hold your guitar in front of you and you say to yourself, out loud

yeah man,
and the learning never ends with the Dead..., I mean so many beautiful sings and how many amazing, different guitar parts were played by them over the years? countless
I think that's the best thing that can happen to you, listening to the Dead and playing guiter

Could jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?
-Homer Simpson-

i agree with you. The only difference is that when i was learning to play the guitar-mostly Dead about 16-17 years ago all this tab and video wasn't really available to me. I had to learn the hard way. By sitting next to the stereo and hitting pause and rewind about 1000 times.

hey HighPeaks, maybe you should be happy about that fact...
I think that it's much better for you're playing and especially for your musical ear if you have to hear the tune, instead of beein lazy and look it up on the internet like I do nowadays. But I can't help it... I will not sit down with a song for hours if I can look it up =(, I'm thankful for every tab

Could jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?
-Homer Simpson-

st. stephen, i am also so very grateful for tabs. when i first started playing i only knew chords and i really wanted to learn how to play some awesome little melody riffs or what not. other than open position the fretboard was a very dark and vast mystery to me. tabs made it so that i didnt have to know any theory but could find the place on the guitar to play some pretty interesting stuff. little lines that when i figured them out, i would be like old man said "wow, i can actually learn this stuff, i can kinda play guitar!".

that being said, i dont really like sitting down with tabs these days cuz i like to make up my own stuff or try to figure it out by ear. i really should learn some classics, i spend a lot of time just improvising, trying to put together chord melodies and stuff like that. which i think is good for developing my ear but i should learn some classic riffs as well. it def. would not hurt and my playing would sound less abstract and be more easily relatable to people listening.

more close to the topic of the thread, playing along with grateful dead recordings has been one of the best ear/hand/brain trainers for me. scales just fit so nicely into the music, they generally tend to stay inside the theoretical rules of music and when they stray way your ear tells you and its cool and you are like wow, these guys are not from this planet. but yeah, good post, OMD, i think about this concept/idea a lot. the grateful dead may not physically be togther, but they are probably my favorite teachers. of course my "band" members are pretty big influences, and my own experiences and sounds that i have heard in my life are guiding me as well.

i think we can all relate to this one cuz we all love the grateful dead on this forum. to anyone learning to play guitar i always reccomend learning the songs that you love to hear played on recordings and going from there.

I agree with everyone here. I was pretty good by the time i found the dead, but I'd learnt on The Who, Zep, The Beatles Cream/Clapton alot in the same way. Obvi, the dead (and bluegrass playing which happened almost at the same time) improved my understanding of theory and improvastion.

The live recordings (offical and bootleg) have alot to do with it. You hear those and say oh, so I can do it one of so many ways and it's cool, or you here a missed enterance or mistake and you say, no big deal.

Lately I don't play much in the way of cover tunes, doing mostly orginal stuff. It's fun to rip through a good UJB or FOTD, or Pinball Wizzards or whatever. But at the end of the day, it really doesn't convey all that much of what I'm feeling, which is (hopefully?) why we all picked this up in the first place.

for me i had no interest in learning bands like the stones or the who, granted i play them now, but learning how to play Dead and related songs just seemed to be a natural progression. it was just easy and the funny thing is that once you got into it, you realized that their music is a bit more complex than what you thought. just amazing how that is.

This IS a great site to learn GD tunes and GD music is so, so, so, so fun to learn and explore. I wish I had the patience to read tabs and/or sheet music. I just don't. I guess it's the ADD in me, or something, but when I look at it, I just get very frustrated and say, "Screw it, I'll do it by ear!"

I can read chord charts a whole lot easier. As far as learning the licks & stuff...I just have to do it by ear....aaaarrrrrrgh.

"Once in awhile, you can get shown the light in the strangest of places, if you look at it right." - R. Hunter

"If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously." - Jerry Garcia